Missed out on your dream web address? New domains are offering new hope

Missed out on your dream web address? New domains are offering new hope

Manly is seven miles from Sydney and 1,000 miles from care, or so the 1920s steamship slogan goes. As a top tourist destination, Manly has always drawn a crowd keen to indulge in the sun, sand, surf and sea.

But Manly isn’t just a place to soak up natural wonders, the small peninsula has turned into a bustling seaside hub.

There’s really no end to the opportunities for a day trip to Manly, only 15 minutes from Sydney, so how do tourists know what spots are worth visiting?

To help tourists unearth the best Manly has to offer, Brian Hall created an online hub, www.hellomanly.sydney.

By visiting the site you can discover that at The Ivanhoe Hotel, locals and tourists gather for pizzas and burgers from 11am till late. At Manly Wharf, after a sun-saturating day, couples sip award winning cocktails and munch on canapes. At iconic The Old Manly Boatshed, revellers take in comedy and live music.

The most important decision Hall had to make was the acquisition a domain name. He chose a .sydney address for a few reasons, first to set his website apart in a cluttered tourism market, second, to own a segment of Sydney and finally because of availability.

“I’ve spoken to a couple of my clients who’ve taken up .sydney and it is just a way of getting a name that you may have missed out on, and it makes it specific to Sydney.”

Hall has been so enamoured of the .sydney address, he’s started buying more domains.

“.sydney was a way for me to get web addresses that I wanted,” says Hall.

“I’ve got another one called www.weddingguide.sydney and I’m going to start doing some wedding type of things, because it’s a growth industry. Weddingguide.com.au is gone, but I’ll have a situation where Google will pick up on [searches for] ‘wedding guide’.”

Hall’s core business is actually printing, but his push into the online world is motivated by that industry’s decline. .sydney domains have given him an opportunity to own regions and industry segments in sydney, just by purchasing a unique domain.